Childhood as an institution
One of the key problematics with which this book engages, as suggested in Chapter 1, is children’s distinctiveness for, in part, it is the supposed differences between children and adults that underpin the institution of childhood. As Jenks has observed:
The child ... cannot be imagined except in relation to a conception of the adults, but essentially it becomes impossible to generate a well-defined sense of the adult, and indeed adult society, without first positing the child. (1996a: 3)
Indeed, as we shall go on to show, what Jenks calls ‘the necessity and contingency of the relationship between the child and the adult, both in theory and in everyday life’ lies at the heart of many of the societal practices that come to be formulated as child-specific laws and policies and it is these, we would argue, that have helped give childhood its special character as a social and conceptual space, both in the life course and in social structure (Jenks 1996a: 3).
It is, for example, through law rather than simply as a result of the ageing process per se, that adults achieve ‘adulthood’ and their accompanying personhood. In the UK their special social status is symbolised by the achievement of the ‘age of majority’ at 18, the voting age, and is accompanied by the assumption of ‘adult’ rights and responsibilities. 'Adulthood’ thus represents primarily a particular social category in the chronologised life-course that may, but need not, reflect processes of bodily maturation (Hockey and James 2002). As Hockey and James note, for example, the precise chronologisation of ageing in relation to life course identities is a relatively recent phenomenon of modernity, a by-product of the rationalisation and categorisation of all aspects of life that industrialisation brought with it. In pre-modern times, by contrast, numerical age played but little part in delimiting what people did and it was only after 1870 onwards that an acute age-consciousness emerged with the consequence that, as Gillis notes, ‘so as not to appear unnatural, everyone did their utmost to “act their age” from birth to death’ (1996: 84).
In this sense, therefore, the categorical stage of ‘adulthood’ (and therefore correspondingly of ‘childhood’) can be regarded substantially as arbitrary, fixed first by the social practices of custom and then the practices of law. It is therefore something that is, potentially, susceptible to change over time. This is indeed the case. Thus, for example, the age of majority in the UK was, until the Family Law Reform Act 1969, set at 21 rather than 18 years of age and as Fortin has observed, in spite of this change the current law in the UK remains confused and there continues to be:
[a] variety of inflexible age limits, below which [children have] no capacity and above which [they have] total freedom to perform the activity in question. (1998: 84)
As Lee (2001) has recently argued, therefore, the idea of a ‘standard adulthood’ as completeness is but a fiction from the Fordist era that is now becoming destabilised by changes in both the economic and the intimate lives of adults. It follows then that the social category of ‘children’ is also in many ways arbitrary and not solely determined by the age and biology of children's bodies.
However, the consequences of artificially fixing – through the law - a chronologised identity for adults within the life course has been to establish, simultaneously, a set of age-based criteria for children that single out children as rather different kinds of people. And in marking out this difference, the law has conferred on children the status of non-personhood, the status of minors, making this another necessary, although not sufficient, condition of being a child. Not having full social personhood, as we explore in our later case studies, is thus in part what makes children children and ensures, in turn, that they are regarded as different from adults.
(Extract from Chapter 2 of James, A., and James, A.L. (2004) Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan.)